| DonFerrari said: There is no production of consoles that is shipped without a store requesting. |
On the contrary, that is not how it works. Consoles are manufactured in numbers that would eventually meet customer demands (customers in that sense are distributors/stores). So in this specific case, 3.2M PS4 consoles were manufactured last quarter, and shipped (in the very sense of the word) to various continents. Some of those consoles were already sold when they boarded the ships, some were not. Since the consoles spend around 12-14 weeks on the ships (for the faraway continents), there is ample time to sell those unsold consoles. This the key and the crux of the business, predict the right amount of worldwide orders a year ahead of actual delivery time. To avoid that too many (or any at all) consoles leave the ships unsold, as this would mean you the manufacturer would have to stock them (and pay for it). Also worldwide shipping means shipping the correct amounts to every destination, you don't want one region overshipped and another region undershipped, leading to more problems and costs essentially. Sony has a pretty impressive track record for manufacturing (=predicting order numbers) the right amounts of consoles over the years.
